itemscope

Itemscope is an HTML attribute used to declare that the element and its descendants contain structured data about a real-world item. It is part of the microdata specification and works with itemtype and itemprop to describe the item's properties.

The itemscope attribute marks an element as a new item. The itemtype attribute provides the type of the item as a URL, commonly a Schema.org type such as https://schema.org/Book. Descendant elements with itemprop define the item's properties; properties may be simple values or nested items with their own itemscope.

Example: <div itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Book"><span itemprop="name">Example Book</span><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Jane Author</span></span></div>

Usage and considerations: Microdata is supported by major search engines and can contribute to rich results when the types used are recognized by schema.org. It can clutter HTML compared with JSON-LD, which is often preferred for ease of maintenance. Some sites use microdata alongside JSON-LD for compatibility or gradual migration.

See also: Microdata, JSON-LD, Schema.org.